DarkAngel crouched on the Blackridge Hospital fire escape, lockpicks working at the closed window. After a few minutes, she nodded in satisfaction and cracked open the window. Quietly, she called out, “Stevenson, you can relax, it’s DarkAngel.” She had been happy to learn Stevenson was the patrolman on duty that night, she’d known the man from the beginning of her vigilante career — an amiable man, lacking the imagination needed to rise in the ranks, but solid and satisfied with a job he did well.
“Come on in, slowly,” she heard in reply. The blonde vigilante pushed the window the rest of the way open and slowly slipped through into the dark room, lit only by city light through the window. She hastily closed her eyes as a flashlight clicked on and shone on her face for a moment, then reopened them when it clicked off and turned to close lock the window behind her.
“So, what is Hudson City’s most popular wanted woman doing here?” the uniformed cop standing by the room’s door asked as he rehostlered his pistol. “It’s not like you can question this asshole even if he wasn’t out from painkillers, not with his broken jaw. You did know about the broken jaw, right?”
“Yes, I did, thanks,” DarkAngel replied, smiling at Stevenson’s usual greeting. “No, I’m just here to help you wait out the night. Something about this case doesn’t feel right, and I suspect this is the place to be.”
The cop stiffened. “You know something we don’t?” he asked as he loosened his pistol in its holster.
DarkAngel shook her head. “No, I don’t know anything. But what’s happened so far — the murder of the Stanson sisters in Japan, Davenport here, the kidnapping of Manning and murder of her guard detail — they’re too much, too brutal. However tough they talk, the last thing organized crime organizations want to do is get into pissing matches with the law, it’s bad for business. That applies to the Yakuza as much as the rest of them, however much they may boast of their honor. I think someone’s playing games. And if that’s the case, Isamu, here, may be a piece someone wants to take away from us.”
“Makes sense,” Stevenson agreed and waved toward one of the room’s chairs. “Well, I could always use some company to wait out the shift. Have a seat.”
“Why, thank you, kind sir,” DarkAngel responded lightly, and startled a soft chuckle from the policeman at the sight of the caped and masked woman in a dark bodystocking curtseying before she took her seat, carefully making certain she could bail out of the chair at a moment’s notice.
Slowly the hours passed by in companionable silence as the two waited out the night, the only noises the footsteps of the occasional nightshift nurse walking past the room. DarkAngel sank into a light trance she had developed from the one Genma had taught her for replacing sleep, one that was much less effective but kept her aware of her surroundings even as she ceased to be aware of the minutes and hours passing by.
Early in the morning, the soft sound of footsteps approached the room yet again, and something about them caught her attention, pulled her from her trance. She listened intently, frowning slightly. The sound was off, somehow. Stevenson had caught something, too, straightening in his own chair off to the side. Suddenly, her eyes widened as she realized what was bothering her — the shoes worn by whoever was approaching didn’t have the same soles as those worn by the hospital nurses that had been passing by all night!
The blonde vigilante was already rising from her seat when the door slammed open, and the male figure in the doorway swung an arm into the room. DarkAngel caught a glimpse of a small, round object arcing toward the bed and dove across the room, tackling Stevenson just as he was rising to his feet and bringing them both down in a pile on the floor even as the room shook from the grenade exploding over the bed.
Rolling to her feet, DarkAngel whirled toward the door and was unsurprised to find it empty. “Stevenson, you okay?” she called out as she darted up to the door.
“I’m fine, go!”
At the shouted assurance, she dove through the door. No gunshots. She glanced both ways down the corridor as she rose from her roll — the corridor was empty. But the stairwells were too far away for the assassin to have gotten that far so quickly, and the branching corridor led past the nurse’s station, so — DarkAngel raced back into the room, past a Stevenson checking over the bloody ruin on the bed, and over to the window she’d come in through. Throwing it open, she looked down just in time to see a man wearing nurse’s scrubs slipping through another window one floor down.
With a sigh, she turned back into the room. “Isamu?” she asked.
“Dead,” Stevenson replied, then looked up and waved in the nurse that peeked around the door. “It’s safe,” he assured the young woman.
DarkAngel cursed softly, getting a raised eyebrow from Stevenson as the nurse double-checked the body. “The assassin ducked into another room and headed for the fire escape, used it to reach a window down one. He was dressed in nurse’s scrubs, he’ll just walk out of any of four exits and be long gone by the time more police get here to close off the hospital. I’ll try to stake out a couple exits, but it’s a fifty-fifty chance.” With that, she stepped through the window onto the fire escape and headed for the roof.
An hour later, DarkAngel sighed as she gazed down from where she crouched by the edge of the hospital roof at the numerous police cars in the parking lot, their red and blue lights flashing. She’d stayed well beyond their arrival, on the off chance that the assassin might have been held up within the hospital and tried to make his escape after the cops had arrived and stirred things up, but if so he’d slipped out of one door when she’d been covering another.
Rising and stepping back from the edge, she pulled her swingline from its grip-case and strode to the opposite side of the building. Even in February, morning wasn’t all that far away. As she swung away into the dark, she wondered how Ranma would react to the fact that one of those involved in his father’s murder was dead.
Stacy quietly let herself into the apartment, and tiptoed through the dark toward the hallway to the bedrooms, only to pause when she noticed the male figure standing at the large living room window. With a sigh, she abandoned her stealth and walked over to join Ranma.
“Are you always out this late?” Ranma asked quietly.
Stacy shrugged. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Aren’t you up a little late? Surely, you’ve made your call to Tokyo by now.”
Ranma shrugged. “Yeah, hours ago. I had trouble sleeping. So what’s the plan for today?”
“There’s no point in trying to get you signed up for school until the paperwork comes through for your citizenship and I’m appointed your guardian, but we can see about getting you measured for a costume and maybe hang out with Kat a little this afternoon,” Stacy replied.
She hesitated for a moment, then added, “Ranma, I suspect you plan on keeping a little list of those that were involved in your father’s death — heaven knows I did after I was raped. Well, there’s one name that you won’t need to include, the man you put in the hospital. He’s dead, someone tossed a grenade onto his bed.”
Ranma turned to stare at his new guardian. “Wow, the Yakuza play rough,” he said. “If that’s how they treat their people that fail, I’m sure glad Dad turned down the offers from them in Japan. And here I thought they just demanded a finger!”
“Oh, Isamu didn’t fail,” Stacy absentmindedly replied, then froze. “Isamu didn’t fail,” she repeated. “Davenport had to be the target, his girlfriend is your typical socialite — her only claim to fame in this mess is that she was dating him and had her life saved by you and Genma. So why kill him? It’s not like the Yakuza don’t have a number of their thugs in jail already, they keep their mouths shut, rule their little piece of territory in the prisons, and have positions waiting for them when they get out.”
“So maybe someone besides Isamu’s boss ordered the hit,” Ranma offered, watching her intently.
“But that doesn’t make sense, either,” Stacy protested. “Isamu’s a low-level gurentai, one step up from the bottom rung on the ladder. The assassin that carried out the hit knew his business. It’s like ... like a World War II general detailing a sniper to hunt down a corporal. What’s the point? There’s always someone ready to step into the corporal’s shoes. Unless,” she continued, “there’s something important about this particular corporal, something beyond his job description. Something he knew, most likely, that whoever ordered the hit didn’t want getting out.”
She gazed thoughtfully at her future ward, then shook herself out of her introspection. “But thinking about that will have to wait, let’s see if we can’t get a few hours sleep before we have to start a new day.”
Ranma seemed to shrink slightly, but nodded. “Sure, why not?” he said, the cheer in his voice sounding distinctly forced to Stacy’s ear, and headed for his bedroom, followed by a blonde frowning slightly in concern.
Read the comments on this episode
(Posted Fri, 15 Oct 2010 06:12)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.